Burack Lectures Bring Russian Poet, Innovative Economist

10-16-2006

By The View Staff

Two upcoming events in the Dan and Carole Burack Presidents' Distinguished Lecture Series will bring one of Russia's greatest poets to campus as well as a MacArthur "genius grant"-winning economist whose innovative research has vastly improved economic accounts of women's domestic labor.
Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko will read and speak on Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. in Carpenter Auditorium, Given Building. His talk is titled, "Baby Yar: An Evening of Russian and American Poetry."
Poets like Boris Pasternak, Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost praised Yevtushenko as the new voice of Russian poetry. With the 1961 publication of his now-classic protest poem against Soviet anti-Semitism, "Baby Yar," Yevtushenko's fame grew. He was the subject of a cover story in Time, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his famous 13th symphony in response to the poem. Today, -Baby Yar- is inscribed in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Also a internationally acclaimed novelist and filmmaker, Yevtushenko has read his poetry at Madison Square Garden, Carnegie Hall, and the Lincoln Center, and is the recipient of numerous international honors. He was the first non-American to receive the Walt Whitman Poet in Residence Award.
Nancy Folbre, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, describes her work as focusing on the interface between feminist theory and political economy, with a particular interest in caring labor and other forms of non-market work. Her talk, "Who Cares? The Economics of Personal Services," is schedule for Oct. 19 at 3:30 p.m. in Billings North Lounge.
Folbre's books include The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, and Family Time: The Social Organization of Care (which she edited with Michael Bittman). She is a Charlotte Perkins Gilman Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship.
Information: Burack Presidents' Distinguished Lecture Series